June 16, 2022 09:47 AM UTC

Throwback Thursday: A Decade In The Wilderness

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• by: Colorado Pols

It’s getting smaller in the rearview mirror every day, but 20 years ago the politics of Colorado were very different. In 2002, Colorado Republicans reached the peak of their power, completing the trifecta of holding the governor’s office and majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.

And then it all started to slip away.

By the 2012 general election, Republican morale in Colorado was at a low point. After briefly retaking control of the Colorado House in 2010 during that year’s infamous Republican wave, poor leadership from GOP Speaker Frank McNulty and wedge-issue grandstanding deprived the GOP of their only veto power in state government in that year’s general election.

As the dust settled on the rout of 2012 for Colorado Republicans, two of the state’s leading conservative strategists, political consultant Josh Penry and former Rep. Rob Witwer who authored the seminal book on the Democratic takeover of the state, The Blueprint, wrote a column for the Denver Post in which they pleaded for a change of course to prevent the losses of 2012 from becoming a trajectory:

Tuesday’s election was a disaster for Republicans. Analysts have focused on the logistical superiority of Democrats and their grassroots machine. But for those who follow long-term trends in Colorado, it’s plain to see that there’s far more to the GOP’s shortcomings than simple tactics…

The bottom line is that the Republican Party has sullied its brand. And unless that changes, the GOP is unlikely to win a competitive statewide race in Colorado for the foreseeable future…

Every year, we kick somebody else off the island. We make it easy for Democrats to say that we don’t want the support of women, Hispanics, teachers, gays and lesbians, African-Americans, conservationists, Muslims and union members. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left to vote for us. [Pols emphasis]

…We’ve forgotten that politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. And here’s some more math: 50,000 Latino kids turn 18 every month in this country. These kids grow up in households where parents work hard and attend church on Sunday. These are American values. But yes, some of these kids — through no fault of their own — were not born American citizens.

We’ve seen the arc of the immigration debate, and through our own personal experiences, we’ve also seen that it must now be resolved at all costs. This is a human issue, with moral (and biblical) implications. It’s time to bury the hatchet and forge bipartisan agreement on immigration reform.

It’s also time to approach cultural issues like gay marriage and abortion with humility, humanity and common sense. How can we expect unaffiliated voters to support a Republican Party that compromises on stop-gap budget measures that kick the can of impending fiscal ruin down the road, but will not even entertain reasoned dissent on social issues?

A decade later, two things are clear: Colorado Republicans did not take their advice, and they have suffered mightily for that choice. The continued attrition for Republicans in Colorado that Penry and Witwer predicted in this November 2012 column came to pass, and was accelerated by Donald Trump’s destructive presidency. By the 2020 elections, Colorado Republicans had lost everything including the statewide constitutional offices they had generally held even as Democrats took control in previous elections.

Today, with the Republican Party more strident than ever on the social wedge issues that Penry begged them to soften up on a decade ago, energized by the impending repeal of Roe v. Wade and full of Trump-driven vitriol on all the issues Penry and Witwer enumerate, their good advice is as distant a memory as Republican control of our state.